OpenMoko / FIC Neo1973 GPL clarification

Since there have been some misinterpretations / rumors in the press about the amount of Free Software in the OpenMoko / Neo1973 product, I felt obliged to release a couple of further details on the GPL situation.

First of all, I'm surprised that somebody would think that I would engage in a project that would use something like binary-only drivers. I don't think that's ever going to happen ;)

Anyway, looking at the current development version, there is not a single in-kernel piece of software that is not GPL licensed. No proprietary drivers, no proprietary flash file systems, nothing.

In userspace, there only one single component that is not going to be under a Free Software License: It's our GPS daemon. The reason for this is, that the specific high-sensitivity assisted GPS that we wanted is only available in something like a "soft modem GPS", e.g. one that does most of the GPS signal processing in software.

Oh, and yes, the bootloader is u-boot (as the frequent reader of this blog might have guessed). So that is GPL licensed, too.